Throwback to 2020: building our team rocket (Part 2) • Slash

2021 is well underway now and we finally managed to take the time to look back at our previous year and capture some of our highlights. Uff, talking about being busy! (Read PART 1 here).

Table of Contents

Highlight 4 – Communicating our content and brand

In 2020, we refreshed our external Slash brand: we released a new website (www.slash.co), the HAK blog (www.slash.co/hak) and HAK podcast on the impact of venture building in the world of corporate innovation!

✍️ HAK blog is the place to find engaging content on venture building and corporate innovation. Here, we post articles on topics ranging from productivity to innovation along with in-depth analyses of relevant trends among other types of content.

🎧 HAK podcast, which we launched in December 2020, we speak with brilliant minds in the venture building ecosystem – what makes them tick, their challenges and models, and the impact of venture building on corporate innovation. Every week we release a new podcast. Subscribe here!

We’re excited to continue building a meaningful brand as Slash, to develop our voice as Slash and original content.

Highlight 5 – Many more Client impact stories!

On the consulting side of the business, we thrive on our client success stories. Despite the COVID-19 challenges, 2020 has been rich in stories where we helped solve significant industry problems as an entrepreneurial technology and hands-on transformation partner.

Here are a handful of public highlights:

📌 We completed and deployed the flagship United Nations World Food Program “PRISM” in Cambodia and are now maintaining it as it scales across all of Asia Pacific, from Pakistan and Papua New Guinea to Mongolia. PRISM provides a near-real-time map of the impact of floods and droughts on vulnerable agricultural communities using satellite data and remote sensor sources. Here is PRISM in the news.

📌 After an incredibly intense 12+ months, we completed EedenBull’s flagship QBusiness platform in collaboration with 65 regional banks in Norway. We then helped EedenBull build their in-house tech team in Edinburgh, UK, and over a period of 6 months empowered them to take over the solution. Since then, Edinburgh has been growing from strength to strength with headline-grabbing press releases in Europe and Asia.

📌 For the last 4 years, we have been supporting AXA’s Innovation team with their products and core tech. Several new products have been launched under our watch and it’s exciting to see how our partnership evolves.

📌 We built the next version of Supermom, the largest online mummys’ shopping heaven in SEA. Supermom is a founder-led business and has an incredible passion for its mission.

Highlight 6 – Building the Rocket

In the theme of our year, “Building the Rocket”, we always intended to make 2020 the year where we would focus less on growing the company and more on building the foundation for Slash to scale to greater heights in the coming years.

In that context, we have been working hard on systematizing the business, with 120+ playbooks to streamline the processes and capabilities of our team across every single area (from finance and HR to software development and product), to assign management roles better, to conceptualize our Slash Experience & Learning Environment, etc. 📚

While more work needs to be done in 2021 to refine these playbooks and get everyone onboard across the organization, we’re excited to see “Slash 3.0” as our delivery team’s operating model come to life and deliver consistent value to our clients.

🎓In addition, several members of our team started their AWS Solution Architecture certification and got certified under R3 Corda blockchain. We also joined Google Cloud as a partner. New Year, new doors with opportunities!

Highlight 7 – Our sales machine

We are making good progress in building our Slash “sales machine”, from lead generation to appointment scheduling, and closing. 📞

🤝 We find that our Slash value proposition of building autonomous scrum teams (what we call “squads”) is well received by corporate innovators and changemakers. What sets us aside is that we bring experience as serial entrepreneurs and product & tech operators scaling digital products and teams; something that many consultancies or tech shops lack.

In 2021, we are scaling these sales processes and teams further.

Highlight 8 – Tech for Good

We became entrepreneurs to have an impact. This culture permeates through Slash and translates into a variety of community and social initiatives.

In many ways, COVID-19 put this commitment to the test: with our pipeline hit and many communities at risk, could we step up and support where needed? We definitely did! ⬇️

🔥 The online hackathon in Cambodia, HacKH-the-Crisis 💻

Held 3-5 April 2020, this online hackathon united the local community to create unique solutions to the challenges that Cambodia is facing due to COVID-19 to save lives and save businesses.

The initiative gathered 206 participants and 56 mentors (local and from overseas), who worked together on 79 pandemic-related challenges.

HacKH-the-Crisis was initiated by Slash and co-organized by Impact Hub Phnom Penh and the state-owned NIPTICT university. We were supported in this project by Cambodia’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunication (MPTC) and Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MEYS).

Out of the many initiatives that came out of it, one to highlight is the COVID-19 Broadcast Solution to help the Cambodian government speak with a unified voice and disseminate official COVID-19 information across all their social media channels. Slash developed this solution pro bono together with our venture partner Clik.

Other ideas that came out of the hackathon can be found here.

🔥To support regional SEA startups, Slash helped a group of regional VCs (Openspace Ventures, 500 Startups, Cocoon Capital), to launch the Support Startups website across Southeast Asia.

The website’s primary task is to assist startups across Southeast Asia with the release of their promotional activities and discount codes for the customers looking to buy products and services from startups, supporting them along the way with their consumer purchasing power.

🔥 In January, Slash organized and held AWS re:Cap in Cambodia. This event gathered over 100 participants, who arrived to discover the newest and biggest announcements from the largest Cloud event of the year.

🔥 In 2020 we also conceptualized and launched HAK Weeks (URL: www.hakweeks.slash.co or www.slash.co/hakweeks), an online corporate hackathon initiative that brings the best of Slash internal capabilities, paired up with our associates in the innovation strategy and facilitator space, to run high-impact online hackathon programs in “1 week”.

HAK Weeks started off as a social idea to help businesses during COVID-19 pivots and is now a standalone service offered to corporate heads of business units who struggle to get their HQ support to digitize elements of their client-facing and internal processes. Through short rapid prototyping programs, they get clarity, can inform their transformation roadmap and train their team on the key agile and design thinking skills needed to take charge of their transformation.

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In 2021, we can’t wait to continue building on our mission of “Teams to Innovate”. We are systematizing every aspect of spinning off venture and engineering teams for our clients and our own portfolio.